Obsession and redemption: "Kidnapping with ransom of Yves Ravey"

The 2010 novel Enlevement avec rancon by Yves Ravey is, perhaps unwittingly, a case study in obsessional neurosis. In this concise work, the reader is guided through the twists and turns of a crime committed by the narrator, Max, who has recruited his older brother to assist him in kidnapping the daughter of his boss at the sheet-metal business where he is an accountant. Despite its resemblance to a crime novel, the narrative is focussed primarily on the knot of familial and professional relations which give rise to the kidnapping plan. Within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, I demonstrate that Max's enigmatic and often contradictory motivations - to get rich, betray his brother, seduce the kidnapping victim - can be explained with reference to Lacan's extension of Freud's work on obsessional neurosis. Lacan, in highlighting the patrocentric nature of this psychological structure, shows that obsession invariably takes the form of a jouissance, a self-destructive behaviour in which the subject takes an unconscious pleasure in his betrayal by the father, and is thereby removed, enleve (kidnapped), from the chain of desire. More broadly, Ravey's novel, like his other narratives in which the father's role in family power relations is put into question, points to a crisis of modernity in which the subject, lacking the law provided by the father yet paradoxically still under its sway, seeks consolation in compulsive rituals.